THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
ALTERNATIVES TO THE WAR ON DRUGS
Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu on July 30, 2000"The U.S. Government has lost the War on Drugs. They fought the wrong enemy with the wrong weapons and all that is left is to find some way to end the destruction and distortion it has wreaked on the fabric of US society."
Why is it that to say that openly is to be heard as approving of drug abuse and all the societal ills that have come with it ?
I do not approve; of drug abuse or the War on Drugs.
We lost the War on Drugs the day it was decided that the War's casualties were the enemy. We lost the War because war was the wrong metaphor; the wrong way of thinking about how to cope with these powerful modifiers of consciousness. World War, Cold War, Guerilla War, War on Poverty--we were obsessed with the metaphor. It led us to a pattern of responses guaranteed to fail.
In that frame of mind, drugs modified our consciousness whether we used them or not ! Drugs are the enemy. Therefore, serious research on them must also be bad. All use of them, for whatever reason, must also be bad. All who use them, possess them, provide them, must be bad. And anyone who fails to denounce them as unmitigated evil must also be bad.
This is not a state of mind in which nuanced, thoughtful and effective strategies for response are likely to occur. In that mental state, we marshaled massive resources only to make matters worse and distort almost every aspect of our society:
Law enforcement, the prison system, the political process (" I did not inhale."), foreign policy, race relations, family relations, civil liberties, even sports and entertainment; only to name the most obvious. (For the details, see the study materials for the Study Action Issue, "An Alternative to the War on Drugs," passed by the GA in Nashville; http://www.uua.org/csw/altwarondrugs.html)
One teenager said to me, "It's crazy. If you want to stop smoking, people fall all over themselves to help you. There's pills and patches and support groups and everything. You're a hero. But if you want to stop using drugs, you have to first volunteer to be a crook. No wonder it's hard to get them to stop."
A Miami DEA agent told me, "Shutting off the supply lines doesn't work. Every time we shut one down, they find another; and, since we can't watch them all, it just multiplies the supply lines."
Part of the problem with the War mentality is that it leads to a "The Solution" way of thinking. There will never be a "The Solution" to the drug problem. This enemy will never be defeated because thinking of it as an enemy, as a problem with a solution, is part of the problem.
Not all drugs are the same; but our laws against them--the rules of engagement for the War on Drugs--show scant recognition of this fact. Psilocybin, mescaline, LSD and marihuana--all non-addictive--are jumbled in along with heroin, morphine and cocaine, and are treated as equally naughty. Heroin and morphine have been routinely withheld from terminally ill patients--even when nothing else would control the pain, ostensibly to keep these (dying) patients from becoming addicted ! Such is the crazy making logic of the War on Drugs.
Alternatives with better odds on success will not come from more and better weapons in a continuation of the War mentality. Better odds has to begin with a different way of thinking about the age old human propensity to modify our consciousness.
The religious traditions of the species are all about modifying human consciousness. Worship experiences that lift us to levels of inspiration; spiritual disciplines like prayer, meditation, contemplation and religious ritual, all modify the chemicals in our brains. And, from time immemorial, some practitioners have gone the direct route with natural substances they have called sacraments--chemicals !
Part of the human propensity to ingest drugs is deeply religious. The drug experience feels like an encounter with something deeper, more intense, more real, more awe-some than the bland rounds of daily existence. It is no accident that some come back from the drug experience spouting language that sounds like quotations from the mystics. There is a deep human hunger for that depth and intensity; the more so in our over organized, over routinized, spectator oriented society.
We have labeled it Sin, and made it deliciously naughty. In the process, we have contributed to the distortion of the drug experience itself. We have made it into a mere mind blowing, escapist distraction, or a gesture of defiance reinforced for the defiant by its intensity compared to the boring lives of their critics. In its place, we offer these "sinners" the housebroken, dishwater thin pap that passes for spirituality in our formal religions.
In a sense, drug abuse is a sin. Not because it is naughty, illegal or even life threatening; though it can be all of those and more. Drug abuse is a sin in the classical sense; as good distorted. The pursuit of the drug experience has distorted the attempt to explore the depths of human consciousness into just another "Wow !" experience to break the boredom. That distortion is the sin, not the mere ingestion of a forbidden chemical.
As we must find alternatives to the Economics of Prohibition, so we must find alternatives to moralism and criminalization in treating drug abuse. It seems possible, indeed likely, that a part of the origin of drug abuse is in a "good" gone awry. That among the muddy mixture of motivations for modifying ones consciousness is a yearning, if not for a Higher Power, then at least for a deeper self; which may be a distinction without a difference. It points to a place where we might begin to understand that propensity of humans to modify their consciousness. That understanding may give us some handles on alternative responses.
William James is quoted in the frontispiece of Houston Smith's, Cleansing the Doors of Perception saying," Looking back on my own experiences [with nitrous oxide] they all converge toward a kind of insight to which I cannot help ascribing metaphysical significance."
There's the rub. "Ascribing metaphysical significance," i.e. meaning, to the drug experience is only one small step away from ascribing metaphysical reality to the images encountered there; a step too many take far too prematurely. Many failed hippies came back from this, the most intense experience of their lives, convinced that these images were the ontological structures of the universe rather than the furniture of their own human mind scape.
I still think that there is only one realm; not two, one spiritual and one natural. Only One. Meaning and being, nirvana and samsara, are One. But that one realm is richer, more profound, more filled with refulgent potential for human consciousness than fundamentalist secular humanists and fundamentalist Christians alike have ever guessed. Our species' deepest religious insights as well as the untangling of the laws of science come out of looking with new eyes; from Cleansing the Doors of Perception. That looking with new eyes may also give us the wisdom to declare a cease fire in the War on Drugs and begin to heal its casualties.
I was the one who got the drug and said, "No."
On Good Friday, 1961, twenty theological school students participated in the last legal Harvard experiment with psychedelic drugs. It was classical science; double-blind, control group, outside evaluators, the works. The question: Does the drug (psylicybin, in this case) produce a mystical experience ? Nine of the ten who got the drug, and one of the ten who didn't, said that's what they had. Three housewives, specially trained to evaluate whether the narratives of the subjects matched the characteristics of classical mystical experience, agreed.
Forty years later, I'm the only one of those seminarians who will publicly talk about the experience. The theological school in question still declines to have in its library a copy of the PhD thesis that came out of it. If repeated today, the experiment would result in one very large drug bust.
Yet, none of the 20 seminarians went on to become drug abusers. Indeed, in a 25 year follow-up 9 of the10 who got the drug said that one experience had positively influenced their lives. The study is routinely and positively cited in research papers around the world. Research (Outside the US !) with this class of chemicals has demonstrated significant value in treating mental illness, alcoholism, drug abuse, intractable pain, and alleviating fear and anxiety in the terminally ill.
Why this set of contradictions ? Because within a few years of that experiment the US indiscriminately declared war on all consciousness modifying substances not sanctioned, coopted and marketed by corporate America.
Our failed War on Drugs contains painful ironies. The "drug problem" is real. The lost lives, trashed families and relationships, lost human potential and productivity, and distorted social institutions are heart breaking. And, our war mentality response to it has only further exacerbated those problems and increased those costs.
One of those ironies is especially poignant in light of the Good Friday Experiment. Religion cures drug addiction, and may be the only treatment that does.
No, I'm not talking about "believing what you know ain't so." I'm talking about that shift of attention from narrow ego to a larger sense of self, and the discovery of the depth of the connectedness of that self to others and "the interconnected web." No matter the metaphors in which it is ensymbolized, whether being in Christ, Buddha nature and praticia samutpadha or the 12 Steps of AA, even--God help us--New Age B.S., it "works."
One father complained to me that he had gotten his kid busted and let me send him to a drug rehab program so that he would stop using drugs, not swap one addiction for another. The father was more threatened by the religion than by the drug use.
Like that father, we have been unprepared to look seriously at the spiritual vacuum often filled by drugs. Is it possible that what works to treat may offer a better understanding of drug abuse than sin, criminality and the demonized enemy mentality of the War on Drugs ?
As a probation officer, the drug scene offered stiff competition to what I had to offer. They were the most tolerant population I ever worked with. They offered instant community to the isolated and disconnected. The experience there--even when not high--was more intense, exciting and "real" than anything they had ever seen in straight society.
Was there a down side ? With a vengeance, and greased skids to boot !
This is the most tragic aspect of the irony: many, maybe most, of our drug abusers are the hungriest for some alternative to the bland as dishwater pap we serve up. Yes, some are losers self-medicating their pain and depression, but most are not. At least, not when they begin.
This may be part of the reason why there is no "cure" for drug abuse. For all the dysfunction of the downside of drug use, that intensity remains a constant siren call that only a life with some depth to it can silence. For those who successfully navigate the path to a drug free life, it is not a path back to health, but a path on to something more fully human.
We really don't want to hear this. It sounds suspiciously like saying something good about drugs. It is not, we say, the message we want to send. It implies there may be something missing for the rest of us.
Well, there is ! Or, why are we in the religion business in the first place ?
If we would shut off the illicit drug trade in the only way it will be shut off, by drying up demand; then we will have to offer something a whole lot more enticing than a couch potato watching "Survivor." Or even my sermons.
I preached on my experience with the Good Friday Experiment a few years ago when my role in it threatened to become even more public. I began by asking how many would be interested in a drug experience in a safe setting where they would encounter themselves and big "R" reality without the filters society imposes. Hands went up all over the room !
In 1961, I was the one who got the drug and said, "No, it was not a mystical experience." Within a year, I had changed my mind. My wife had known it the next day.
We are slowly beginning to resume the research so pre-emptorily closed down in 1965. What may we yet learn about that deeply religious hunger that has led humans in all times and places to modify their consciousness ? Can we learn to use it as an alternative to drug abuse, and in treating the life-chaos it produces ? Can we lose the stigma of its use with intractable pain and the terminally, with PTSDs and mental illness ? Or, perhaps, we will not have to wait for addiction, pain and approaching death to learn to not withhold ourselves from life.
THE AUTHOR
Rev. Mike Young is the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu. He was a subject in the now famous Marsh Chapel Good Friday Experiment in 1961. He helped rescue failed Hippies while UU Campus Minister at Stanford University 1965-69. For the next 13 years he was a Los Angeles County Juvenile Probation Officer in a special project working on the street cheek-by-jowl with LAPD. As minister of our congregation in Tampa until 1995, he was on the Police Chief's Citizen Advisory Committee, and is currently on the citizen advisory committee for the Needle Exchange Program in Honolulu.